


appraisal when you're the target

by orphan_account



Category: Black Swan (2010)
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, F/F, Free Verse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:30:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Nina/Lily, destabilise</p>
            </blockquote>





	appraisal when you're the target

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jb_slasher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jb_slasher/gifts).



You are not the kind of girl to indulge unrequited love.

No. You don't want to remember her. She's too hard to visit. They don't want you to remember, so  
it all works out beautifully. The company has a reputation. Costs don't exist, yet, so  
there are no consequences  
to sloughing off every evening. No one is supposed to sleep with a bomb in their breast  
least of all the dancer on every poster, least the critical review: the perfect compelling performance.

You could say it was duty  
to use yourself up on people to whom you'd say,  
your cunt clenched hard around their fingers - you're not worth me, but yes. Yes, no, yes.  
You were never perfect for them nor they for you. That was your understanding.  
Thomas liked you wild, drugged on your own rebellious selfhood,  
legs smothering him nose to neck across his well-meaning well-fucked mouth,  
adding to the bleed of light pollution mountain to mountain across the city bowl  
subtracting from the virus of precision move by move across the studio  
thinking only as far as one and two now three:  
he's the perfect studio romance.  
You were the one hot for teacher. Twice you were, now you aren't. But the imperfect girl  
isn't sidling up to you with a glance, only you stare at her hard enough,  
as if the gains of the 20th century would collapse on her shoulders like wings to rest  
and everything she'd ever lost to her mother and her fellow dancing women and girls who never said she was beautiful could be  
regifted. That's what you do, give others passion that others in turn gave you.

This was your rhythm. You were going to teach her a little discord.  
But she's so empty you'd have to give her everything, all your hellbitch moves you were taught:  
Your pickup lines. Your favorite drinks. Your favorite way to lick a lady apart.  
Your empathy, because you lay on your bed legs open, knowing what was good for her  
but she never knew what was good for herself. She tries to understand and only twirls onto the black swan:  
its stubby claws in her long limbs, and she turns a graveyard bird, darker and lovelier  
unreachable, untouchable, locked behind a therapist  
while in her the swan breeds its children. You like a duckling stumble blindly to the ward door every day  
hoping for a glimpse of her, and everywhere only calla lilies piled around her, the flowerpocked cards  
\- get well! to remind her she has never been.  
To remind her she has never been with the lily in the rough.  
Your kind of dark, the controlled slips and pieces of dark not  
this illness where day after day she dreams about the black chunks of human hearts  
and all you wanted to show her was a taste of nightclub,  
of pumps blackleather, of blackbras, smokehazing into the studio ceiling  
where twenty feet away you blew the cleaning man so hard he'll never care about a cigarette.  
To just a little momentum you would introduce her, let her stir herself into awareness  
of what imperfect girls can be.  
Not this where she fell headfirst, while you weren't looking and somehow you were left behind.

Forget it, the cleaning man says, why are you so dead tonight? I want you like last week,  
with your hair mussed like you ran to me after class, the please mixed in your lipstick.  
I want you to present me the right version of you.  
And she lays on her hospital bed, whispering feeble to the nurses  
and you want to teach her all over again never to have to present the perfect arrangement of herself.  
She's the utterly most imperfect thing and she once coated herself in a perfection so sugar-complete  
that sucrose splintered left too little left of her for anyone to reconstruct.  
(You broke it with a tongue up her slit.  
Told her it never happened because you were supposed to give her a little at a time, go slow- so you dreamed it, Nina. Only dreamed it.)  
They'll let you into the room next week, the nurses say. She says she'll talk to you.  
One sentence at a time, darling; don't give her too much.

In the end there's only the wild core of you,  
raw as cow heart dripping as served in the (steak) house  
as you set out to court her again, her toddling white-robed from the hospital like a goose  
born only in down shawl, with none of the slipper _pointe_ quills  
that would turn her into a beat old albatross like you.  
You open your beak to say "hey", then, and offer her flight again;  
her mouth drops open like a trapdoor about to snap shut on the whole thing and burp  
but this time, you're going to watch her flop ungainly out of the air  
and most important: you're going to regift this time the lesson of getting back up.

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback very welcome and appreciated.


End file.
